Saturday, March 24, 2018

Thomas A Brady was the older brother of famous in their day James Topham Brady, lawyer and Judge John R. Brady.

All three sons of Irish immigrant parents escaping the stacked deck against native Roman Catholic Micks in their homeland and the Act of Union 1801 with Great Britain.

Story goes that Thomas S. Brady and pregnant wife Ann, or so the story goes, their passenger ship arriving in the shelter of New York Harbor in 1812 only minutes ahead of a British Man of War in hot pursuit, harassing and attacking all bound for America shipping in the so called War of 1812 during the Napoleonic World War with Britain.

Father parent Thomas S. Brady started in Newark NJ where Thomas A Brady was born in 1813 before moving over to Manhattan. Many people in those days from Brooklyn and Jersey would go by boat to Catholic church services at St. Peter's, the only RC church for miles around. That wooden church at the time in downtown Manhattan.

Famous lawyer and Tammany backroom king maker James Topham Brady was born in Manhattan in 1815 and lived on Warren street, only a few steps from there to City Hall or St. Peter's in the middle of a very poor dock area that was the center of the Irish immigrant area in New York in that second decade of the 19 century.

Thomas S. Brady made a small school in his attic where he tutored in Latin and taught many young and ambitious sons of other would be middle class in their own nativc Ireland who reinvented themselves in the strange English speaking American Republic in its early days.

Many boys that played togetheror were tutored by the senior Brady would become the backbone of business, banking, politics of New York City in decades to come. Among those boys in play and study with the Brady boys the first American Cardinal John McCloskey of NYC. That small tight knit New York Irish community would see immigrant sons dominate future politics of the Tammany machine with lawyers, district attorneys, judges, aldermen etc.

That Thomas S Brady was self taught and studied nights and passed the bar, entered politics as an alderman and magistrate and eventually ended life as a sitting judge in the local courts.

James did some public service but did not like it. But he was immensely successful as an orator and trial lawyer. John was the one who would become a judge, a highly respected judge on the local New York Supreme Court. It was Judge John R. Brady who was called upon in the middle of the night to swear in Vice President Chester A Arthur as President of the United State in 1881 upon the death of President Garfield who finally succumbed to injuries of being shot in an assassination act of a radical at the Buffalo World's Fair. First swearing in of President Arthur at his home on Lexington Avenue and second swearing in a few days later in Washington DC.

The oldest son for some reason, a lawyer by training, joined the Navy / Marine Corp and died in some skirmish prior to the official win at Tampico which really was only a foothold invasion as a prelude for the later bigger prize of the port of Vera Cruz.

As far as I can tell, the elder Thomas S Brady, James Topham Brady and John R. Brady are buried in the old St. Patrick's Cathedral on Mott Street in Little Italy/Chinatown in down town Manhattan. Buried in the Brady family vault in the catacombs below the old Cathedral. I presume Thomas A. Brady is buried in Mexico.

The old cathedral burned down in 1866 and the archdiocese was not going to rebuild except for all the rich and influential Micks in business and Tammany politics who had relatives and loved ones already buried underneath the burned out wooden church. Rebuilt, it is now a parish church and called the old St. Patrick's Cathedral. The present cathedral was already under construction in 1864 mainly as a Tammany Hall boondoggle project to launder money through inferior materials and no show jobs etc. Which is why they recently spent 200 million to keep the place from falling down again etc.

Anyway, all these earlier immigrants had a comfortable niche made for themselves in the new world when the Irish Potato Famine hit and a tidal wave of immigration hit the United States with New York City as the epicenter of that man made British genocide fueled by the Corn Laws with a phony government price set for wheat grown in the UK as a means to profit off it in England and even sell it overseas. That the peasants / catholic serfs in Ireland could not afford wheat and or bread. That they fed themselves on one strain of potato that succumbed to blight in the middle 1840s. That all through the famine the British landlords profited off of wheat production and exports even as the serf class starved. No wonder the early immigrants like the Bradys saw the unfairness of British rule and immigrated to America, Canada and Australia one generation prior to that human disaster.

One of those strange things of how evil in the UK actually profited the descendants of immigrants forced to leave with a better life elsewhere and now the UK on the edge of a cliff cutting itself off from Europe with BREXIT. Karma. Whatever.